Saturday, September 08, 2012

I am bloody tired of those people on the forums who are reiterating that there is no plagiarism. I find them almost as annoying as those who are casually and erroneously accusing others of plagiarism. I am also not going to discuss this on the forums because I am not going to invite abuse from the deniers. To that end, I am offering the two essays I received, preceded by the links to where the original text can be found. You tell me that I am witch-hunting and trying to find plagiarism where there is none and I'll dismiss you as a denier. These are obviously what they are and anyone who cannot see the obvious isn't ready for an upper level undergraduate English course.I have changed nothing from either essay. These are copied here as they were submitted to me for peer-review.http://serendip.brynmawr.edu/sci_cult/culturedisability.html

Not only is our wisdom not total, there is yet much to be learned from others.

The perfect unit for displaying such instinct and insight is what is called "culture," a much contested term that is generally taken to gloss the well bound containers of coherence that mark off different kinds of people living in their ways, each kind separated from the others by a particular way of making sense and meaning.

In The Country of the Blind, a One-eyed Man is confused and confusing. That is what it is like to be in another culture. With time, had he been a decent person, he could have learned their ways well enough to write about their particular version of wisdom.

Culture is not so much a product of sharing as a product of people hammering each other into shape with the well structured tools already available. Culture is seen as a process of hammering a world in H. G Well’s novel.

When culture is understood as the knowledge people need for living with each other, it is easy to adapt to surroundings. Before entering the Country of the Blind, Nunez thought that sight was essential to being fully cultured and that having sight in a world of people who cannot see would net him the cultural capital of a King. He was arrogant. Did Nunez really have to be locked so thoroughly out of the culture of those who could not see? Need we think that the Country of the Blind had only one way to be, or that the blind and the sighted had to suffer because of an enculturated difference?

In the Country of the Blind even a blind woman can be made disabled. In every society, there are ways of being locked out because culture is seen as a disability.

The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells is a science fiction classic written in 1897. The novel was first serialized in Pearson’s Weekly the same year it was published.

Griffin is a scientist who devotes himself to the field of optics. While working in his research Griffin discovers that he can change the body’s refractive index to absorb all light and reflect none, which makes him invisible. The scientist uses himself as his first experimentation subject but fails to reverse the process. After his friend betrays him, Griffin decided to murder him and begins his own personal “reign of terror”. What if what you consider a blessing is also a curse? The Invisible Man by H.G. Wells touches on this very same question. How many of us wouldn’t like to be invisible? That’s what the protagonist, Griffin, thought when he became invisible only to find it to be the bane of his existence. Yes, there are some positives aspects, but H.G. Wells concentrates mostly on the negative ones.

I thought Wells did a good job building up the atmosphere that is prominent throughout the story. Actually, the atmosphere is the star of the book as none of the characters resonated with me and the storyline, which mainly consisted of wrecking havoc for havoc’s sake, was not very inspired. The story itself is also quite funny, I thought and many of the scenes played in my mind as slapstick.

The Invisible Man is the ultimate story of an insane anti-hero, before insane anti-heroes became popular. Griffin himself becomes more and more pathetic as the story progress and from the comical start Wells moves away to a darker, subtle satire of small minds in small towns can be just as dangerous as any psychopath.

Friday, September 07, 2012

I vented (ranted, whatever) about the forums in my previous post so here’s where I try to break it down into something useful. As before, you will find a summarized bullet-point list of the problems and suggested solutions at the bottom of this post.

The problems, as I see them, include:

Leaderboard

Organization

Anonymous Posting

Up/down-Voting

Leaderboard

I do not know why or what purpose it is supposed to serve
but the coursera staff built into the course a leaderboard. This doesn’t track your grade as compared
with others. Instead, it says who has
received the most up-votes. In other
words, it’s a popularity contest and if you say something nice or something
that others like you will be voted up and if they don’t like what you have to
say you will be voted down. Even if you
ask a question that has been asked before, you will be voted down. If you ask a legitimate question that maybe challenges
the boundaries of what others want to believe, you will be voted down.

But what I suspected would happen is happening and some of
the more popular people have begun being voted down even when they aren’t
saying anything that is, as far as I can tell, deserving of a negative
vote. The truth is, I have no clue where
the leaderboard is or what the stats are.
I found it and was so put off by it that I never went back to look for
it. This isn’t a video game and nobody
cares nor should care about who is “winning” by getting the best votes.

Organization

You can’t imagine how thrilled I was when Blogger finally
introduced nesting in the replies. Now,
when I reply to someone, it looks like a reply because it is indented slightly
from the original comment. Imagine,
however, that they are not nested. A
person posts something and the first comment looks different but it is not
indented because there are two ways of replying. If you reply directly, your reply doesn’t
appear on the forum as having a new comment/reply. It simply doesn’t register. You have to leave a comment that isn’t
indented at all for it to register on the forum. And none of those are indented.

So if the first comment receives five “hard” comments, none
of those are indented. Now, if each of
those receives four comments, all of them are indented to the same degree, even
if the third comment is actually replying to the first comment. Visually it falls under the second so it will
look as though it is in response to either the initiating comment or the one
immediately above. Unless the person
typing the comment actually addresses the previous comment/reply with a name
included in the content, there is bound to be confusion, right?

What’s worse, you have to factor in posts from a variety of
Anonymous people, most of whom do not identify themselves with a
pseudonym.

So open a thread with what you think only has five or six
pieces and you actually open one that has about thirty comments and one third
of them are anonymous, two or three different ones, maybe or maybe just one
person being anonymous over and over and over again . . . well, you can see why
it would be somewhat confusing.

Anonymous Posting

I’m not going to address myself further to this because
Laura Gibbs wrote about this and my previous post also looks at this. However, anyone who has been online for any
length of time knows what happens when people can hide behind being anonymous
and the inevitability of the abuse that quickly follows. The fact that people are down-voting out of
pettiness instead of legitimately addressing harmful or offensive posts with
the votes, which is probably why coursera had to add a way to flag posts in the
forum.

Up/down Voting

This ties in with both the Leaderboard and Anonymous Posting
issues. It lends itself to a popularity
contest and those people who are most liked will be up-voted. It also lends itself to bullying so that
someone perceived as strong will begin being down-voted to keep them humble or
put the popular one “in his/her place.”
It’s vulgar and it serves no real purpose. If I hadn’t seen such things happen so many
times before, where a person who is a message board favorite becomes victimized
by newbies on the board, I wouldn’t have seen it coming. But I did.
From a mile away. It’s vulgar and
typical.

So the problems in summary:

Leaderboard

Organization

Anonymous Posting

Up/down-Voting

And now for the solutions, which are merely suggestions.

Leaderboard

Get rid of it altogether.
Or keep it hidden from the student body.
If there is some administrative purpose for having something like this
then it shouldn’t be openly available to the students. If there is no purpose other than to turn the
forums into a popularity contest, get rid of it.

Organization

There should be nesting that goes beyond one degree. All replies to the main post can remain flush
left but then there should be at least two degrees of nesting below each of
these. In other words, a reply to a
reply to a comment should indent twice.

Anonymous Posting

Students should be allowed to post pseudonymously but never
anonymously. A student who abuses
pseudonymous comments by attacking or belittling another student, would be
warned that a second offense would remove pseudonymous posting privileges. If a
student continues to abuse other students, all forum privileges are taken away
altogether.

There are legitimate uses for Anonymous posting. Therefore, all Anonymous posts will go
through a screening or, if an anonymous post is flagged, it will be immediately
locked. Screening would require either
staff or a group of student volunteers who will approve any and all Anonymous
posting. This is too labor intensive, however,
when you have over 39,000 students. This
is why I suggest using the flagging system.
It’s already in place. Any
anonymous post/comment/reply that is flagged would be immediately locked; a
pop-up would simply say “This thread has been locked for review.”

Any Anonymous post that is flagged and deemed inappropriate would
be removed. The person who posted would
receive a warning. Currently, there are
no repercussions beyond having an inappropriate anonymous post removed. This does nothing to deter the person from
doing it as many times as they like in as many threads as they choose. A warning would presumably keep anyone
inclined to abuse the system from doing so.

There are legitimate reasons for posting things Anonymously
and there’s no reason to stop using it altogether. Adding a pseudonym option gives those who
want to remain hidden a way to post, without adding confusion by being one too
many anonym while clear limits about how the Anonymous feature can be used
would keep it from degenerating into a means of abuse. This will also keep the discussions on the
forums from devolving into sophomoric attacks.

Up/down-Voting

I want to say get rid of it altogether. I can see no purpose for it. If you write a good post, people will comment
intelligently to it. If people don’t
like a thread, they will either say so or they will flag it, if it is
inappropriate.

Last but not least, a suggestion that needs to be
implemented and would resolve more than a bit of the above.

Blocking

Students should have a means to block a particular person,
however they post—whether under their own name, pseudonymously, or
anonymously. If I find a post from
someone I think is annoying for whatever reason, I don’t have to waste the
staff’s time by flagging it or my own by down-voting it. I can simply block the person. Now, I am not the type to block someone just
because they say one thing I find ridiculous or silly. But if an anonymous person says a named
person needs to “grow up” in response to an intelligent observation about something
we are reading, then I can choose to block that anonymous person. But the person who just posts a single
mean-spirited word in reply to even an inane thread, I would probably block
that person because if they have time to be mean in an inane thread it’s only a
matter of time before they become hostile in a more relevant or provocative
thread.

If the staff will not protect the students then I should
have the ability to protect myself. And
if, when I block an anonymous person, I end up blocking someone who posts
pseudonymously and with their name, then do I really care?

And yes, I think if any one student is being repeatedly
blocked then someone in the staff might want to look at what the student is
posting, see if there is a pattern of being rude, inconsiderate, or even
mean. Yes, culturally speaking, online
communication may leave too much room for one student to think another is being
rude but that doesn’t mean a student should be able to post with impunity. But even if the staff cannot do anything to
stop them, I should have the freedom to cut off an idiot from leaving comments
to anything I post, even if I am sometimes just being a petty bitch.

I also have one personal request, a minor issue on the main page of the forums. At the top of the page are the main folders
and, besides each of these, it shows the most recent activity for each
folder. Beneath this are a list of the
individual threads with the most recent activity but you can’t immediately tell
in which folder some of these appear. I
have more than once accidentally clicked on an intriguing thread subject only
to find myself reading a thread about a book I haven’t finished reading or even
started reading yet. If I could have
seen where the message thread was filed, I would have seen that it is under the
thread for a book that I haven’t even started.

Problems Summarized:

Leaderboard

Organization

Anonymous posting

Up/down-Voting

Solutions Summarized:

No leaderboard whatsoever.
Also remove all up/down-voting.

Add nesting to the messages.
Also, label all posts on the forum main page with folder information.

Update the main forum page to show how many individual
comments there are.

Anonymous posting should be discouraged. Allow pseudonymous posting.

Abuse of posting to the forums should block posting by that
student altogether.

Students should have a means to block anyone who posts
things they find offensive or annoying.

If the purpose of the forums is to help build community, where there is abuse, spiteful comments, bullying, and anonymous posting, there can be no community. The internet has been around long enough and these things have shown up often enough on message boards that the staff at coursera absolutely should have known these things can happen.

Now they need to step up and do whatever it takes to create a safe and healthy learning environment for everyone who registers for a course.

Wednesday, September 05, 2012

This week I
received two essays which were plagiarized so one can immediately see how well
the addition of the Honor Code button is working. Within the course, there have been a few other changes but, so far, they merely prove that the more things change,
the more things stay the same and today I really want to weigh-in on the forums.

When the course
first opened up, there was no individual place to discuss each of the units so
it wasn’t long before people who were reading ahead were posting threads about Alice
in Wonderland mixed in with Grimm’s
Fairy Tales
and there were a few very ambitious readers posting about Dracula and Frankenstein. However, the coursera staff stepped up on 25
July and added folders for each unit to reduce the confusion that so many
intermingled topics would inevitably create.

Also,
sometime the week before last, they introduced flags. If someone were to post something that is
completely inappropriate, the students can easily flag it and the coursera
staff will take care of it.

On
22 August, someone copied and pasted an essay they received for the peer-review
which they felt was plagiarized. Someone
immediately posted a comment that quoted from an email we all received when the
course began and in this email, Dr. Rabkin wrote the following:

Please
remember that the essay belongs to the essayist. None of us has the moral or,
under U.S. copyright law, the legal right to post someone else's essay. One
does have the right to post a brief
quotation if one is using that "for the purpose of criticism
or review" (again, quoting U.S.
copyright law), but one can probably do
just as well with paraphrase. ("In an essay I read, the writer
asserted that....") Even if one is praising a fellow participant, lengthy
quotes are not legal. On the other hand, it is perfectly legal to post your own
essay and invite criticism or use that posting as an opportunity to respond one
way or another to a comment made about it.
Whether or not that is a good idea in any given case, I am happy to say,
is a choice for each of you.

It
took whoever is responsible for monitoring the forums an entire week to delete
the post that clearly violated one of the few guidelines we students have
received. A week. So you can imagine how much longer it takes
for them to remove abusive statements, attacks, etc. I have to imagine because, at this point, I
am so put-off by some of the posts I see on the forums that I simply cannot
expose myself to them any more than I do.
Reading what I think is a potentially informative thread only to see it
degenerate into the sort of juvenile nonsense one finds far too often online is
discouraging, to say the least.

(Interestingly, it's happened again today and I am almost curious enough to see how long it will take for the shared essay to be taken down.)

The
thing is, what choice do the students, the ones who are taking the course in
hopes of learning something? What are they supposed to do?

The
purpose of the forums is to give the students a way to ask questions, to
discuss the literature, to perhaps share insights and ideas. Without a professor to guide the learning
experience, the students are given no other recourse. Yes, we have the video lectures but these are
only available after we have finished the assigned reading. During the time we are reading these texts, the forums
should be a safe place where people can let ideas flow without fear of judgment
or attacks.

Why do these things happen?

Simple: Anonymous
posting.

Now,
I want to state up front that there are some people who have chosen to use the
ability to post anonymously to good purpose.
Some have even cleverly created a pseudonymous signature to
differentiate themselves from all the other anonymous posters. It is reasonable, when wanting to ask how to
deal with an essay that is not in sync with the syllabus, what the reader should
do. If this week’s essay should be on
something by Wells and the essay is on Stoker or a book we have not yet
reached, how should the peer-reviewer grade the piece? Or when a student is unhappy with the score
they receive for an essay and want to get other people’s opinions, why shouldn’t
they be free to submit the essay to the forum with the same anonymity with
which the submitted it for peer review? These students are using the ability to be anonymous in a manner that is appropriate and even respectful of the other students. I’ve also seen people who could not submit their essays on time, whether
because of a technical issue on their end or within coursera itself or for
whatever personal reasons, choose to share their essay anonymously to get the
feedback they couldn’t otherwise. They know that they will not earn credit for this essay but they are here to learn, offering their own essay and offering to review other students' essays who may have been likewise unable to submit their piece.

This
is how the forums should be used and are meant to be used. Of course, where anyone can post anonymously
it isn’t long before those who want to abuse the system shall do so. Hurtful and immature things will begin being
posted in response to legitimate posts.
Perhaps not immediately but always inevitably.

And
so it goes. The forums too quickly
degenerate into bullshit.

One
person actually suggested I should post less on the forum so I could get a
better grade in my essays. And Laura Gibbs was told she is not “erudite” which is pretty impressive, to find a troll
able to use a word that has more than two syllables, but to suggest a woman who
has shared a lot of helpful information, has further proven herself to be more
than knowledgeable in the potential of online education, and who is, as we all
know, a college professor is not erudite is simply ridiculous. And I think I’ve initiated about five posts
all together. Two of which were
announcements for a study hangout on google+.

It’s
easy to dismiss such childishness for what it is but the implications of such
behavior should not be so easily ignored.
In the media we are seeing the consequences of bullying in the
educational system and the rally cry seems to be that the schools need to
create a safe learning environment for all students.

How
can a student feel safe when they are being slammed with ad hominem
attacks? How can a student feel safe
when one person calls another “stupid” or a whole thread labeled as stupid or a
waste of time or worse?

I’ve
said before that some of the things found in the peer reviews would never ever
be tolerated in Dr. Rabkins University of Michigan classroom. Yet, coursera does nothing to stop it,
nothing to address it, and the nonsense perpetuates.

I’ll
take the time to offer some suggestions on what changes could be implemented to
stop the abuses but I am frankly too disappointed right now to be bothered. I have two essays to review and tomorrow I’ll
have time to explore the issues with the forums some more. In the meantime, I think I’m just going to
avoid them altogether. What beneficial
content I might find in a thread that is trying to share meaningful discussion will
degenerate into a pointless rant or anonymous attack anyway so why bother?